44 parts Complete Avira Mehra has lived her life in quiet compliance.
Her days are a careful rhythm of expectations - school, home, and the soft, suffocating reminders of a future she never chose. She speaks softly because her words are weighed before they leave her mouth. She smiles because it is easier than explaining the hollow ache in her chest. She exists in a house filled with love, but not freedom - where her father's word is law, her mother's silence is agreement, and her own desires are something she has learned to fold away, like letters that will never be sent.
Her marriage has been arranged since she was sixteen. The man is good enough, her parents say. Stable, respectable, the sort who will "take care" of her. Avira has seen him in meetings heavy with awkward politeness. She tells herself it will be fine. It always is. People get used to these things. She will get used to it too.
Still... sometimes she wonders if life is meant to be endured instead of lived. Sometimes she catches herself watching the world outside her window - the laughter of strangers, the recklessness of youth - and she feels a pull, sharp and unnameable, toward something she's never had.
And then Pretibha Singh arrives.
She is the kind of girl people turn to look at - loud without speaking, sharp without trying. Pretibha wears her freedom like it was stitched into her skin, unashamed, unafraid, untouched by the chains Avira has known all her life. She is everything Avira was told not to be, and perhaps that is why Avira cannot look away.
One evening, under the dim glow of a streetlamp, Avira asks the question that has been burning her alive.
"If things were different... would you stay?"
Pretibha's gaze holds hers for a long, breaking moment. When she finally answers, her voice is softer than Avira has ever heard it.
"If things were different... you wouldn't need to ask."
And Avira realizes - some people don't just change your life.
They show you the life you'll never have.
